ALT-3 The Daily Grind how Commuting is Bad for the Soul
In Texas, we accept a long commute as a difficult, but necessary, part of life. The rationale is that it's better to live where you want, in an area you like, and make the drive to the sprawling clusters of office buildings that don't seem to be close to where anyone lives. It's a fair trade, we tell ourselves, because we make more money than we could working closer to home. To make matters worse, most Texans hate the idea of both public transportation and carpooling, so the roads are even more jammed than they might be in other states.
After more than ten years of commuting I found myself finally considering the toll it takes on me physically, mentally, and yes, even on my soul. It hit one day, as I rode in the passenger seat of a friends car, how little of my surroundings I have ever even noticed during my 62-mile one-way commute. My round trip commute is 124 miles per day, and I have rarely given it a second thought.
Lately, however, I've come to believe that we're slowly killing ourselves. Every day that we spend hours upon hours on the road, paying tolls, dealing with high gas prices, and dodging other irate commuters, a little piece of us dies. We spend less time with our families, less time recovering from the day, less time on things we enjoy. We leave for work earlier and earlier in the morning hoping to get ahead of the traffic, only to find that hundreds of other have done the same thing, and that we gave up the extra sleep for nothing Given that, is the extra few dollars and hour we earn really worth it?
The commuting culture isn't only bad for our soul, it's bad for the soul of our communities. We rarely know our neighbors, because our commutes typically take us in opposite directions. If we're not working on the weekend, we're frantically trying to get everything done that we couldn't do during the week. Nationwide chains have replaced our locally owned business, because no one is around in our neighborhoods to support local business. Ultimately our homes, which were the reason for the long drive in the first place, become nothing more than a place where we catch a little sleep.
Maybe it's time to really weigh the benefits of the higher paying job against what we pay in return. Would you trade that extra $2, $5, or $10 an hour for 2 more hours of good sleep a day, less time wasted sitting in traffic, the opportunity to know your neighbors, and more time with your kids? I'm starting to think that I would.
